Nietzsche & Plato

Five readings of Nietzsche, six axes

Heidegger, Deleuze, Strauss, Foucault and Wu each read Nietzsche from a different stance. Score them across metaphysical seriousness, literary attention, genealogical depth, esoteric sensitivity, political weight, and Chinese pertinence. The polygons diverge precisely where the schools disagree, and that disagreement is the substance of the field.

In January 1946 the Nuremberg court declared Nietzsche's thought 'an ominous portent of the Nazi regime'. Wu's preface begins from this verdict and observes its immediate inversion: rather than disappearing, Nietzsche's thought became one of the most influential currents of twentieth-century philosophy. Heidegger, Jaspers, Gadamer, Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, Leo Strauss — each took a position relative to Nietzsche; outside philosophy, Weber, Freud, Jung, Stefan George and Thomas Mann did the same. Wu's opening assertion frames the entire book: 'If we do not understand Nietzsche, we cannot understand the basic direction and inner spirit of twentieth-century Western thought.' The book that follows is not a popularising introduction. It is a sustained engagement with Nietzsche through the question — Wu's own and Heidegger's before him — of how Nietzsche's anti-Platonism relates to Platonism itself, and whether what Nietzsche called the 'overcoming' of metaphysics is in fact its completion. The contradictions Wu emphasises are not embarrassments but the philosopher's working material: the linguist who wrote in aphorism; the most popular 'philosopher-poet' who is the most academic puzzle; the man who diagnosed nihilism and was read as its prophet. The site that follows is built around Wu's seriousness about these contradictions, and about a Chinese philosophical reading that owes as much to Strauss as to Heidegger.

Chapter One opens with the question that organises the entire book: what is Nietzsche's basic philosophical problem? Wu accepts Heidegger's framing as a productive starting point. For Heidegger, Nietzsche's two great thoughts — Will to Power and Eternal Recurrence — answer the metaphysical question of Being in two registers: Will to Power answers the question of what-being (Was-sein), Eternal Recurrence answers the question of how-being (Daß-sein). On this reading, Nietzsche is engaged in the question of the being of beings — Sein des Seienden — despite his lifelong opposition to Platonism. Heidegger draws the famous conclusion: anti-Platonism is itself a form of Platonism; Nietzsche, the inverter of Plato, completes him. Wu does not reject this thesis but he refuses to let it close the conversation. He observes that Heidegger's reduction of Nietzsche to 'reversed Platonism' is both philosophically precise and interpretively narrow — precise because it identifies Nietzsche's actual metaphysical commitments; narrow because it forecloses the positive content Nietzsche meant his philosophy to have. The book that follows is Wu's effort to recover that positive content without abandoning Heidegger's analytic clarity. Whether the recovery succeeds is the open question of the entire monograph.

The centerpiece of Wu's first chapter is a reading of the brief, lethal passage in Twilight of the Idols titled 'How the True World Finally Became a Fable: The History of an Error'. Nietzsche narrates the history of Platonism in six stages, beginning with Plato's original positing of the true world as accessible to the wise, descending through Christianity ('the true world, promised to the wise, the pious, the virtuous'), passing through Kant ('unattainable, unprovable, but consolatory'), into the bright positivism of the late nineteenth century ('the true world — an idea no longer useful, no longer obligating'), and ending with the fifth stage: the true world is abolished. So far so familiar. Wu's emphasis falls on Nietzsche's sixth and decisive move: when we abolish the true world, we also abolish the apparent world. Because the 'apparent' was defined relative to the 'true'. There is no longer a two-world structure; there is only becoming. This is the move Heidegger calls the completion of Platonism — and Wu agrees that it is structurally that. But Wu also reads it as the point where Nietzsche escapes the binary the metaphysical tradition has used to organise itself for two and a half thousand years. After the sixth stage, philosophy has new work to do; Wu's book is, in part, an account of what that work might be.

After the abolition of the two-world structure, Nietzsche needs an account of what is. He offers two: Will to Power and Eternal Recurrence. Will to Power says that all being is a creation of the will of life; everything is constituted, valued, made meaningful through forces in tension and contest. Eternal Recurrence says that all becoming and creation are destined to perish, and that the world is the perpetual return of 'the same' — the same patterns, the same struggles, the same affirmations. Read naively, the two contradict: if everything recurs and so is fixed, what does it mean to create? Heidegger's resolution is that the two answer different questions: Will to Power names the what-being of beings; Eternal Recurrence names the how-being of becoming. They are the two sides of one metaphysical structure. Wu accepts the structural unity but insists on a phenomenological supplement: Eternal Recurrence is also, and perhaps primarily, a thought experiment about affirmation — could you bear to live this life exactly so, again, infinitely? The Übermensch is the figure who can say yes. The combination — to will eternally what already eternally recurs — is the closest thing in Nietzsche to a positive ethics. Whether that positive content survives the Heideggerian reduction is the book's recurring question.

Nietzsche's corpus does not develop monotonically. Wu adopts a four-part periodisation that corresponds roughly to the structure of the rest of his book. First, the early period — The Birth of Tragedy and the Untimely Meditations — dominated by the Greek question and the diagnosis of Socratism. Second, the so-called 'free spirit' period — Human, All Too Human, Daybreak, the first four books of The Gay Science — in which Nietzsche radicalises positivism against Platonism and lets the demolition do its work. Third, the Zarathustra period — Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, On the Genealogy of Morals — where the positive doctrines (Übermensch, Will to Power, Eternal Recurrence) emerge and the writing strategy itself becomes part of the philosophy. Fourth, the late campaigns — Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist, Ecce Homo, the final fragments before collapse — in which Nietzsche speaks more loudly, more bitterly, and more politically. Periodisation is not innocent: different readers stop the development at different points. Heidegger reads Nietzsche through the last fragments and finds metaphysics completed; Strauss reads through Beyond Good and Evil and finds a strategy of esoteric writing; Wu reads through all four and tries to hold them together.

Wu's second chapter is built on the early Nietzsche — Birth of Tragedy and the early fragments on truth and lies in the non-moral sense — but read from the late Nietzsche backwards. The pre-Socratic Greeks, Wu argues following Nietzsche, achieved a balance: natural philosophers like Thales, Heraclitus and Democritus held a clear will to truth, but did not let knowledge-drive overwhelm the tragic-religious horizon that gave Greek life its scale. They thought the world without dissolving the tragedy. Socrates broke the balance. Hostile to the noble confidence of the tragic Greeks, Socrates used dialectical reasoning to destroy tragedy and to replace it with a rational-utilitarian moral preaching. Plato — for Nietzsche the highest spiritual type of the ancient world — then spent his life defending this preaching, sanctifying what had been 'a popular topic and folk song' into the eternal Good, the True World, the One. This, Wu summarises, is Platonism: 'of all errors so far, the worst, the longest, the most dangerous'. The early Nietzsche then asks the genealogical question that prepares everything later: where did the value of truth come from? The answer, scandalously, is that truth as a metaphysical value was forged out of the will to lie — the will of a particular kind of life to disguise its own decadence as the universal good.

Wu's third chapter is the longest. Zarathustra is the figure through whom Nietzsche's positive content has to be transmitted, and Wu reads the book as a treatise on education — both the education Zarathustra offers and the education he himself receives. The Übermensch is not, on Wu's reading, a biological superman; it is the philosophical figure capable of holding Will to Power and Eternal Recurrence together — the one who can affirm life including the eternal return of the worst of life. Wu pays careful attention to the question of why Zarathustra repeatedly leaves the crowd, returns to the mountains, descends again. The structure is pedagogical: every descent teaches Zarathustra something his earlier speeches missed; every retreat strips an illusion from his teaching. The Übermensch, on this account, is something Zarathustra grows toward through his own failures with the crowd. The chapter on Will to Power gives the metaphysical ontology; the chapter on Eternal Recurrence gives the affirmative test; the chapter on 'education facing the future' synthesises both into a programme of slow, hidden cultivation aimed at a few who can withstand the doctrine. The crowd, in Wu's reading, is not Zarathustra's audience. The few who could be Übermenschen are.

The most distinctive contribution of Wu's book — and the section that places it most clearly in a particular Chinese-language scholarly lineage — is the chapter on esoteric and exoteric writing. Following the late Leo Strauss's reading of Beyond Good and Evil, Wu argues that Nietzsche is doing two things at once: addressing the philosopher (esoteric, between the lines) and addressing the people (exoteric, on the surface, often inverted from the esoteric). The two voices are not contradictions to be reconciled; they are a deliberate strategy. The philosophers since Plato, Wu argues following Strauss, have not been pursuing truth in public; they have been 'serving the people and their superstitions'. Wu lays out three classical errors in the history of philosophy. The first, the Enlightenment philosopher — Bruno, Spinoza — who fights popular prejudice in public, suffers persecution, and gets martyred for truth. Nietzsche, Wu emphasises, does not praise this. The second error: the Epicurean / cynic hermit who declines the battle but also forfeits influence. The third (which the book unfolds slowly): the popular philosopher who simply accommodates. The future philosopher, on Nietzsche's recommendation, should 'hide in shadow, even wear a mask'. The truth-telling is for the few who can hear it; the surface is for the public who must be cared for.

Chapter Four is Wu's account of what the philosopher must do once Platonism's history of error has ended and the two-world structure is dismantled. Beyond Good and Evil is read as a programmatic text: it sketches a future philosophy, a future religion, and a future politics, and the three are inseparable. The future philosopher has obligations the past philosophers did not. He must not martyr himself; he must not retreat; he must not flatter the public. He must instead, as Nietzsche puts it, prepare an inheritance for a few who can carry it. The political mission is not the building of a particular regime — Nietzsche has nothing programmatic to offer there — but the cultivation of a culture in which the noble type can again exist. Wu is careful here, and the care is informed by the German abuses of Nietzsche he opened the book with: Nietzsche's politics is at most an aristocratic radicalism (Brandes's phrase) hostile to mass politics in all forms, not a programme for any twentieth-century regime. The future religion is parallel: not a new theology, but a way of life that affirms becoming without needing the consolation of the True World. The future philosophy is the synthesis: a thinking that has fully absorbed the abolition of metaphysics and that cultivates, in private and across generations, the few who can affirm Will to Power and Eternal Recurrence together.

Wu's conclusion returns to the Greek opening. The pre-Socratic Greeks are Nietzsche's positive model: a civilization that maintained the tension between philosophy and tragedy without letting either devour the other. Natural philosophers thought the world; tragic poets and the cults gave the Greeks a horizon that made their thinking weigh. Socrates inverted this. Where the early Greeks had held the philosopher and the people in productive non-confrontation, Socrates used philosophy to attack the people's tragic horizon, and Plato then sanctified the attack as the search for the Good. The deepest charge against Platonism, Wu writes following Nietzsche, is that it inverted the relation between philosophy and popular belief. Where the pre-Socratics had kept philosophy clear of the people's myths without destroying them, Platonism took a 'popular topic and folk song' and turned it into the metaphysical Truth. To pacify the people's fear of impermanence, Platonism invented 'virtue is happiness', 'reward in another life', 'the eternal Forms'. The book's closing posture is therefore not nostalgic but normative: the future philosopher's task is to restore the pre-Socratic non-confrontation — to think the world without destroying the people's horizon, and without sanctifying any popular belief as the True. Whether this is achievable Wu leaves open. That it is the orientation Nietzsche was looking for is what he believes the book has shown.

Ask the Codex

Five open questions the book raises and does not close, read in turn by a philosopher, a classicist, a Heideggerian, a Straussian, a theologian, and a contemporary Chinese reader. Where they agree is solid ground; where they diverge is the open frontier — and that frontier is, on Wu's reading, where Nietzsche actually lives.

Eternal recurrence, scale by scale

The Eternal Recurrence test runs at every scale, from a single moment to twenty-five centuries of civilisation. Could you affirm this much, exactly so? Toggle the scales the test is run at, and watch the demand grow. At the largest scales the question becomes Wu's: can the post-Platonic philosopher affirm even Platonism's long history of error?